Art

February 03, 2018

At an opening at the Morgan Library & Museum celebrating exhibitions of Peter Hujar’s photographs and Tennessee Williams’ memorabilia, a gentleman in a maroon jacket marveled that the Morgan, known for collections of old master drawings and manuscripts would now show photography, especially of the type created by Hujar. While Williams’ scripts and Playbills form the kind of closeted history right up the Morgan’s proverbial alley, well, Hujar’s work is something else. A decade older than Robert Mapplethorpe and Nan Goldin, Hujar too documented the downtown demimonde, its denizen in drag. Hujar’s portraits—black & white-- haunt, testament to the era before AIDS, a vibrant artistic world in the autumn of life.

September 13, 2017

You are never too old to practice yoga—or too young. Nina Salpeter teamed up with her father, award-winning graphic designer Bob Salpeter to create a book Teach Your Child Yoga, to help parents teach yoga to children from one to six years old. Taking known positions, such as “downward facing dog” and “lotus,” to name just two, Nina Salpeter has teased out the family-friendly ingredients, animals, and comfort food—(she calls the familiar cross legged seating, “criss cross apple sauce,”)-- in order to capture the essence of each pose, providing a visual prompt that brings the images close to a child’s experience.

August 26, 2017

Eric Fischl might be the East End’s busiest artist: aside from painting, and showing his work, the North Haven-based painter is President of Guild Hall’s Academy of the Arts, and active with his wife April Gornik in the effort to rebuild the Sag Harbor Cinema as a community film and arts center. When he was tapped to create a poster for this year’s Hamptons International Film Festival, now in its 25th year, he immediately said yes: “I am honored to be part of it. This poster is my fourth,” the artist told me in a recent interview. “I did the first festival. That’s why they asked me.”

August 25, 2017

Photorealism had its moment as a genre of painting in the 1970’s, right? The exhibition at the Parrish Art Museum, featuring paintings from every decade since then, gives ample proof that Photorealism has not gone away. Rather the exhibition “From Lens to Eye to Hand: Photorealism 1969 to Today,” provides vibrant work from many artists who use photographs in their capacity to render detail. Early practitioners like Don Eddy: “Wrecking Yard I” from 1971, and Audrey Flack’s “Shiva Blue,” (1972-3), “Petit Fours” from 1976, and “Hers” from 1977 show pioneering work in this style. Flack’s “Wheel of Fortune,” (1977-8) dominates one gallery. These sit comfortably near recent paintings by Yigal Ozeri: “Untitled; Territory” from 2012, “Untitled; Olya” from 2016, and “Untitled; Olya & Zuzanna” from 2017, or Don Jacot’s “Herald Square, 1936 (After Berenice Abbott)” from 2013, to name just a few.

August 23, 2017

A simple walk through Guild Hall’s exhibition “Avedon’s America” is an encounter with the familiar. Portraits from the world of pop culture: Hendrix, Joplin, Dylan, along with iconic fashion work like Dovima with elephants, evening dress by Dior, Cirque d’Hiver, Paris, August 1955, grace the walls. A favorite portrait of mine is the loving embrace of poets Peter Orlovsky and Allen Ginsberg from 1964, naked and showy, the former with his genitalia limp, just part of the candor from an era when such displays were just not done. So is it merely loving, or up yours to anyone uptight?

July 31, 2017

The grounds at Watermill Center, Robert Wilson’s art retreat on the east end are always difficult to navigate, what with slippery grasses and rock paths. It would have been good to follow Daedalus’ flight, as the evening’s theme suggested, flying high—but not too high-- into the sun. Alas in myth, the sun’s heat melts his wings and he perishes. That’s what happens when you soar too high. Evoking this myth as well as Lou Reed’s lyric, this year’s pre-gala cocktails had hubris galore on the paths through the woods. And there, in the large courtyard, a wall boasts, “SHE OUTWITS HIM/ SHE OUTLIVES HIM.” On its other side, artists, formal in black suits, one from Lithuania, graffiti with spray paint, the art called “Too M@ch Talk.” These days, walls say much.

July 25, 2017

By 7:05 PM, just when a “Fountain of Color” explosion event was planned to surprise guests at the cocktail hour and art viewing at LongHouse Reserve’s gala on Saturday, organizers had to announce instead that because of extremely dry weather conditions, Cai Guo-Qaing’s artistic contribution would not occur. Of course the irony was not missed: by dinner time it had begun to rain—lightly—and umbrellas were distributed as Cai, game and animated, displayed his designs for the explosion.

July 18, 2017

Russell Simmons’ Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation Art for Life Benefit is always a great night, but this year’s benefit, “Midnight at the Oasis,” at Fairview Farms in Bridgehampton, was special thanks to a performance by Cynthia Erivo. Much beloved for her Tony awarded turn as Celie in last year’s revival of The Color Purple, Erivo channeled Whitney Houston for “I Want to Dance with Somebody,” and begged indulgence for an under rehearsed cover of the Beatles’ “Let It Be.” Trust me, no apology was necessary. Meantime, Simmons who is vegan, is finding more and more inventive ways to serve pasta “Bolognese” and “chicken” over waffles to the large crowd supporting this charity every year.

July 01, 2017

Errol Morris’ new film, The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography, is his most intimate yet. Usually working with out-sized personalities, McNamara to Rumsfeld, the murderous gasman of Zyklon B, to point at a few of his subjects, documentarian Errol Morris has the further distinction with his 1985 The Thin Blue Line, of having changed the course of one man’s destiny with his investigative work, unearthing evidence that showed he was innocent of murder.

Elsa Dorfman, a longtime friend seems a smaller portrait indeed by comparison, but the filmmaker caught up with this mild-mannered photographer just as the Gentle Giant movers were removing some large scale Polaroids for storage, so the resulting movie surprises as it covers the technical aspect of Polaroid photography, and perhaps, the end of an era. In conversation, Errol and Elsa complete one another’s sentences.

June 19, 2017

At a grand exhibition at Guild Hall of Taryn Simon’s photography, a man of color looks out from his seat at a bar. The site could be the iconic American working class watering hole in Lynn Nottage’s Sweat on Broadway, with Christmas lights dangling down. But it is the American Legion Post 310 in San Diego, California, and according to the wall text this photograph documents the location where 13 people placed this man, Frederick Daye, but he was convicted anyway of rape, kidnapping, and vehicle theft and served 10 years of a life sentence. This color photography exhibition, “The Innocents” is Taryn Simon’s earliest work, from 2002, and from the look of the stunned faces, it could be plucked off today’s headlines, except that today, and here’s a sinister thought, many of these wrongly accused and convicted individuals might be shot first.